Hans Helleman Helleman itibaren Mukim 8, Penang, Malezya
Best book I've read this year; one of the best books I've read in my life. I took a minor's worth of coursework in African-American studies and often choose books about African-Americans and the Civil Rights movement and I had more "aha moments" and deeper, more powerful insights about the African-American experience while reading this book than anything else I've read on the subject. The book was engaging and written for a popular audience with the express purpose of collecting and translating government reports, census data, sociological studies in a memorable narrative, following the lives of three southern African-Americans chose to migrate along one of three major routes during the Great Migration of 1915-1970. If your entire body of knowledge of African-American history goes: slave trade >> Civil War>> Martin Luther King Jr. >> Barack Obama, you will find this book readable and accessible and won't feel thrown off the deep end of unfamiliar terms and events. Many reviewers have sung its praises more thoroughly and eloquently than I; here are the central aspects of this work I find most excellent: - Isabel Wilkerson spent 15 years writing this book and conducted 1200 interviews. Her Pulitzer-prizewinning newspaper journalism chops sing on every page. She did her homework and has been justly rewarded for it, but the readers are the real winners. - She very carefully chose to tell this story in the narrative non-fiction genre. This means that while it's history, it's journalism, it's non-fiction, it's also not littered with footnotes. The book manages to be deep without being dense, and with three main, very distinct, characters to follow, it reads like the best novel you ever read. - Those "aha moments." I'll never know what it was like to live during or under Jim Crow, or to suffer racial discrimination from birth. I feel like every description of the Jim Crow south mentions colored waiting rooms, lynching, and the back of the bus. You are forced to encounter these discriminations in new and painfully personal ways in this book, while getting an education in what it meant in a broader context. Isabel Wilkerson takes you to the back of that bus, flying over the bumps, with no restroom stops for blacks, and finally, shamefully wetting your pants. You'll be collecting your luggage on a southbound train to move from the integrated car to the segregated car at the last stop before the Mason-Dixon line. The omnipresent disinformation campaign against blacks in the South was newly evident and horrifying to me in this book...the idea that you'd be beaten or worse for learning a bus schedule or adding to verify your paycheck... The other big "aha moments" for me were the descriptions of the very severe seemingly arbitrary discipline Southern-born blacks visited upon their children. The one thing -- the ONE thing --these parents could do to protect their kids was to sometimes literally beat it into their heads to be totally subservient to authority so that once their children hit puberty they would have the reflexive, instinctual situational sense of self-preservation to not draw the ire of whites. And there were thousands of arbitrary instances in which this ingrained inferiority was the thing keeping body on this earth, the soul having sought other refuge. Another major "aha" was the repeated use among migrants at that time of the term, "Americanization" to describe the mind-boggling acculturation of learning to operate in the North. As in, people whose families had been here for twelve generations had to learn an entirely foreign culture when they embarked on their journey to realize their citizenship. If you love rap music, read this book. If you hate rap music, read this book. If you have every lived in or loved an American city, read this book. If you're terrified to enter an American city because of drugs and gangbangers and housing projects, read this book. If you voted for the first African-American president of the U.S., read this book. If you are counting the days until the first African-American president is voted out of office, read this book. If your forebears immigrated and pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, read this book. If you never got any boots, read this book.